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Monday 7 May 2012

Running Sharepoint Central Administration Site on more than one server in the Sharepoint Farm

Lately i was asked, if it's possible to run the SharePoint Central Administration if the application server hosting it is offline/dead. 
So yes, It's Possible !
Consider the following simple 3-Tier Sharepoint Architecture farm
Here are there are three servers
  1. SharePoint Database Server : This server contains the SQL server dedicated/Shared to the SharePoint 2010 Farm. It contains all the database for the Web Application/Service Applications residing in the SharePoint Farm.
  2. Application Server : This server contains the Central Administration Site hosted and all the other service applications running on it.
  3. Web-Front End Server : This server will act as the web-front end server. There can be more than 1 WFE server in a SharePoint Farm, where load balancer will balance the end-user request coming to the SharePoint farm to each of this servers.
So now at this point we have Central Administration site running on the application server. But what if the Application server is down ? Our site which has been hosted on the application server will be inactive and your sharepoint farm will be without Central Administration Site.

So in order to overcome this issue we can configure the central administration site for the farm on the Web-Front End server as well.

How to do that?

For this we need to configure the SharePoint 2010 on the WFE (In Case, you have already configured it, reconfigure again) using the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard.

Initial setup will remain same, Follow the screenshot's specified below







Now 'Advanced Settings' comes into the picture, Click on it
Generally if we do not want to create separate Central administration we use the first option, But here as we want to create additional central administration  we will select the second option. Click on OK and Finish the wizard.


On Successful, completion of wizard it will open the central administration site of this server!



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